Jane Goodall: Fluent in Chimpanzee

Jane Goodall, the primatologist, is bilingual. She speaks chimpanzee and will break out into a raucous chimp greeting at any opportunity.

Ms. Goodall, 78, is best known for her groundbreaking work demonstrating the links between humans and chimps. In 1991 she founded the youth group Roots & Shoots, an environmental group in 132 countries. She says she spends 300 days a year on the road, bringing her this week to Beijing.

Ms. Goodall sat down with China Real Time to explain how her love of Africa and chimpanzees has expanded to a larger environmental mission.

What brings you to China?

It’s my 13th visit. I’m here because I go all around the world taking a message to people who sometimes need waking up, sometimes encouragement, but most of all hope. So that’s my job – to go around the world sharing the stories of hope.

Are you hopeful?

When you think that we put a robot on Mars, and we’ve walked on the moon, and we can build these bizarre buildings that go up and up into the sky and, although it’s horrible, we have built atomic bombs and split the atom and genetically modified food, those are the kinds of things we can do if we want to. So if we all got together and really wanted to stop this crazy rush to extinction we could do it.

How is it going?

I’m hopeful because of the young people, because of what the human brain can do, because nature can be so resilient if we give her a chance.

How does your early work on chimps relate to the work you do today?

We’re still finding out new things about the chimps. In a way, they bridge our human world and the world of the other animals, and it’s because they’re so like us that I was able to convince scientists and even some religious people that we’re not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom. I knew it before, but the chimps enabled me to convince many other people.

Do you still think about your early chimpanzee friendships?

Yes. I miss them. To have left Gombe [Tanzania] as I have, when they were still alive, that would have been tough. But they’re not there anymore, although there’s a few who have offspring who I know very well. It’s not the same. Not the same.

Do you go back to visit the chimps?

Oh, I go back every year. I don’t spend long at Gombe – I don’t have the time – but three, four days. They come close to me and I’m supposed to get up and walk away.

Do you?

I find it’s rude; no, I don’t. I’m not going to give them any diseases; I don’t have any.

Do any of them have the sense that you are someone they should know and remember?

Flo’s daughter Fifi [two of her initial chimpanzee subjects] only died just before our 50th anniversary. It was sad. I’d hoped she’d be there. But her oldest offspring, Freud and Frodo, they know me really, really well. I watched them grow up. And one or two others like that, but apart from that, they’re just youngsters who grow up and I didn’t watch them grow up.

You often talk about how your mother’s encouragement shaped your life.

It was even more than encouragement. I never heard any of them say, “well you can’t do that because you’re a girl.” It didn’t enter the conversation. Outside the family it did, so it was like two worlds.

Many people know the story of your childhood stuffed animal.

My father gave me Jubilee [a stuffed chimpanzee] because I loved animals. That didn’t set me on a determination to study chimps. I never had the faintest idea that I could study a chimpanzee.

Anything you’d like to add?

Don’t buy ivory! The elephants are going. It’s one of the campaigns that we’re starting with Roots & Shoots. It started in Hong Kong because when I arrived in Hong Kong they’d just seized a shipment at customs representing the death of 600 elephants. Tanzania has lost one-third of its elephant population in the last three years.

Where are you going next?

Taipei, then Seoul, then Tokyo, and somewhere else in Japan, and then to Nepal, and then to Abu Dhabi, and then a couple of events in London and then to Germany and then back to England for Christmas.

Will you ever reach a point where you’ll cut back on travel?

I’ll have to, won’t I? I mean, either I fall down dead while I’m still able to travel this much, or it will have to get less. I mean, nobody goes on forever. Byron has that lovely poem which I can never remember, “the sword outwears the sheath…and the heart itself must rest. So we’ll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon” – it’s beautiful.

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